Walls of death

Almost before the victims of a terror bombing are buried, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are plastered with gaudy montages of the latest poster boys and girls of the Intifada. Kevin Toolis reports from the 'suicide city' of Jenin on the iconography of the martyr

On the day we arrive in Jenin they are the only people, apart from small boys, on the streets. Not real men but ghostly figures, their eyes staring from every wall, haunting the absent living; suicide bombers, gunmen, killers, young men, some of them just boys, dressed up in guns, swaggering for the camera, vowing to defeat the overwhelming enemy before so willingly, or unwillingly, going to their own death.

Under Israeli military curfew, the dusty streets of Jenin, a city of 90,000, have been abandoned - the residents hiding from the occasional marauding tank behind their flimsy front doors. Nothing moves apart from a few skittish cars driven by the brave or those foolhardy enough to risk their lives for a bag of groceries.

In that fearful silence, Jenin's walls are an open gallery of martyrdom, a repository for this new and terrible art form of the Palestinian intifada, fusing self-sacrifice and inhuman slaughter within the boundaries of a glossy A3 poster. Part propaganda, part cliche and part artwork, each poster commemorates those killed in the most recent Palestinian uprising.

Some elements are set. Across the top there are always a few verses from the Koran vowing to continue the struggle. Then there is a picture of the young man, often just a family snap, against the background of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, to symbolise his martyrdom for the Palestinian cause.

Like a circus acclaiming its latest act, each Palestinian terror group then formally introduces their latest killer: 'The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] proudly presents the executor of the Jerusalem martyrdom operation... Izzadin Al-Masri'. In the top corner is the emblem of the organisation, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Fatah, that sent this young man or young woman out to die one bright morning.

At their worst, these savage documents are a pornography of violence, gloating in the suffering their subject has inflicted. Some incorporate digital news images into the poster - shattered baby buggies, ambulances and the gathering of fragmentary body parts from a bombed-out restaurant turned human slaughterhouse. No detail, regardless of how cruel the act or how young the victim, is glossed over.

For the Palestinians, anyone killed by the Israelis is a martyr and at their saddest the posters are a flimsy roll call of that largely anonymous death toll. Most of the young men depicted - Marwan, Mahmud, Hussain - are not suicide bombers, but died one at a time in now-forgotten gun battles or stone-throwing riots with Israeli troops in their home streets, their deaths too meaningless for the outside world to require the mere details of their names for the nightly news-wire round-up of who died in the Middle East today.

In another life, another city, far from the silence that engulfs this place, the same faces would appear on the walls of the local football club, signifiers of a brief moment of local glory before settling down to the encumbrances of marriage, children and a middle-age paunch. But not now. On the walls of Jenin they are forever young and forever lost. Through their posters these cannon fodder of the Palestinian intifada live on a little longer. Like an overcrowded graveyard, every gatepost, every metal shutter, every inch of Jenin's walls is taken up. The innocent are mixed with the guilty; women and children killed in Israeli assaults are included as testament to the cruelty of the enemy. New martyrs must compete for space, overlapping and obscuring their predecessors, now ripped and torn, and faded by the indifferent sun. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, each has its own poster squad ready to plaster the walls, put a mark on vertical territory, and proclaim their own group's latest deadly hero. Their work is never finished.

The posters are the new art form of the electronic intifada. Their elements are digitally grabbed from satellite television, or scanned in from family photos or news wires on to pre-figured templates. In theory they are digital compositions that can be created anywhere in the world and then sent back via the internet to Jenin to be printed and plastered around the town. The first posters of 'the bride of Haifa', the Jenin female suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat, who blew up Maxim's restaurant on 4 October, killing 19 Israelis, appeared in Gaza, hundreds of miles away, five days after the bombing. But, in practice, the posters are almost always produced in the same war zone where the killing went on.

But not all martyrs are equal. In this competitive death league, real glory, and the biggest print run of posters, is apportioned to those 'bombing martyrs' who make it through the military checkpoints surrounding what the Israelis describe as 'suicide city' to the Jewish heartland that begins just 10km away. The laurels of this cult of death are reserved for the greatest atrocity; blowing up Israeli civilians on buses, in restaurants, in snooker halls, anywhere the bomber could find them.

Take Izzadin Al-Masri, a 23-year-old from the village of Aqaba near Jenin, who walked into the Sbarro pizzeria on the corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem just after 2pm on 9 August 2001 and pressed the button on the 10kg nail-studded bomb he had strapped to his body. Fifteen people died, seven of them children. It was, even as these things go, a particularly cruel attack. Five members of one orthodox Jewish family, the Schijveschuurders, were killed, including 18-month-old Hemda.

What goes on in the minds of men like Al-Masri? Is it joy, that they have reached their final destination and that the enemy is, like the bomber, a few nanoseconds from death? Or fear of failure that something will go wrong at the last moment?

The eyes on the walls of Jenin give no clue, but Al-Masri's 'martyrdom' was widely celebrated in Palestinian communities and a pocket-sized version of his martyrdom poster was handed round to be pinned up in bedrooms, as if he were the latest footballing hero. In one version his picture is set against a background of tulip fields and lush forest to evoke the paradise he has attained by his act of slaughter.

In the full-sized poster, Al-Masri is dressed as a commando, his blood-red eyes staring at the camera as he staggers to keep his balance under the weight of two assault rifles.

Across his chest is another ammunition pouch with another magazine for the rifle and a pistol, lest he run out of fire power. His forehead is adorned with Hamas's green band of martyrdom, bearing a verse from the Koran.

The military posture is a common propaganda ruse, a device for recasting the coming act of terrorism into a heroic battlefield engagement. Al-Masri is dressed up for combat, but in reality his 'enemy soldiers' were civilians armed only with slices of pizza and bowls of mixed salad.

But there is little space for pity in a place like Jenin, where the bitterness of exile, 50 years of misery as refugees, has turned all hearts to stone. 'You reach a level of fanaticism where the Israelis become one. You generalise. There is no difference between a civilian, a child or an adult. It's all the enemy,' says Dr Iyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist who has studied the psychology of suicide bombers.

The gun-toting picture session, with all its bravado and bluster, was just part of Al-Masri's martyrdom death ritual. He knew he would be dead before the image appeared on thousands of posters across the West Bank.

Behind him on the poster is the golden mosque and, in the background, pictures of a Hamas demonstration, with masked young men dressed up in white robes like Ku Klux Klansmen with dummy explosives strapped across their chests - symbolising their willingness to enter the paradise that lies on the other side of the detonator.

The posters glorify, but they also seek to recruit more human bombs, easing the path to suicide by force of the sheer numbers, now over 200, who have gone before and the social stature endowed upon these shaheed - martyrs.

In life, Al-Masri was a shy, five-foot-five boy with a squint who was the sixth child in a farming family of 12, from a village in the middle of nowhere. He worked in a small restaurant in Jenin and probably never fired a gun in his life, which was bounded by the rituals of his small community, his family and his religion. There would not have been the private space, or notion of individualism, that Westerners take for granted. According to his father, Sh'hel Al-Masri, Izzadin spent a lot of time praying in the local mosque, never said much about the Jews and never told anyone he was on his way to Jerusalem to die.

Aqaba is set away by itself on the road from Jenin to Tubas in a fertile valley. There is no Jewish settlement on the hilltop horizon. There were no arrests of family members or gun battles in the agricultural village. There is no personal incident to explain how this ordinary village boy turned himself into a human bomb.

After the massacre, the Israeli army blew up the family house. The rubble is still there but the Al-Masri clan moved into another family house next door. We arrive unannounced, but Sh'hel Al-Masri is friendly; we are the latest in a straggle of visitors to attend what has become a sort of shrine to his son's martyrdom. He poses for pictures on the remains of his old sitting room, seemingly reconciled to the devastation his son has brought down on the family and neighbourhood.

We sit on the new family balcony, smoke a few cigarettes and talk about Izzadin. In Palestinian eyes, Al-Masri's 'martyrdom' operation had conferred greatness upon him and his family. The Al-Masri family had risen up the social ladder with their dead son; we found the house by asking for directions to 'shaheed Al-Masri's house'. Nothing that was going to be said would question that elevation. One of Sh'hel's sons hands out spare copies of the martyrdom poster along with cups of coffee.

There is no sympathy for the Jewish children killed by his son. 'The Jewish children - they are so important to them. But our children are important to us. I hope everyone becomes a martyr, because this occupation causes tears in every Palestinian heart,' says Sh'hel Al-Masri. His words, devoid of anger or passion, are as empty as the space where his old house once stood.

On every Palestinian street, in every town and every village there are many young men like Al-Masri. He did not need to be particularly bright, or brave, or even very religious. He just needed to be himself - a willing volunteer ready to die in the Palestinian war against the Jews. His murderous dedication is by no means unique; there was, and is, a small army of shaheed willing to join him.

The suicide bomber war has become the main battleground between the Palestinians and the Israeli military. The Israeli 'separation fence', the curfews, the checkpoints, the ring of tanks around Jenin and the killing of Islamic militants are all tactics to halt the flow of would-be martyrs from this city of despair. But the military clampdown has only slowed, not stemmed, the onslaught.

On the Palestinian side the posters, and the glorification they confer on the willing dead, are also weapons. Through the posters, the martyrdom videos of soon-to-be suicide bombers, the demonstrable satellite television coverage of the blown up Israeli buses, the cult of martyrdom has grown stronger. And evolved.

Once it was only young men like Al-Masri who became suicide bombers, but now young Palestinian women are joining the procession of the dead. In May 2003, Hiba Daraghmeh, whose poster covered many walls in Jenin, killed herself and two Israelis, and injured 70, at the entrance to a shopping mall in the northern Israeli city of Afula. She was 19.

Female suicide bombers, who combine sexual purity and self-sacrifice, have an especially powerful allure within Palestinian communities. But Hiba Daraghmeh is doubly special, because she was the first female suicide bomber from the fanatic Islamic Jihad terror movement, whose power base lies in Jenin.

In Palestinian culture, women are normally under the authority of their father, brother or husband. In the past, the secret recruitment of a woman, even for a suicide-bombing operation, would have been seen as a stain on the honour of the family's male relatives. Palestinian women were off limits in the suicide-bomber war. But Hiba Daraghmeh's recruitment this year, while studying English at Al-Quds university, shows that those cultural constraints have broken down. Daraghmeh is the first of many female suicide bombers to come. In October she was followed by a would-be lawyer, Hanadi Jaradat, also from Jenin.

Daraghmeh's path to martyrdom was simple: revenge. Her brother Bakr, a member of Yasser Arafat's Force 17 security force, was badly injured in a shoot-out with Israeli troops in May 2001 and was recently sentenced by an Israeli court to 22 years imprisonment for terrorism offences. When they arrested Bakr Daraghmeh, Israeli troops raided the family home - an act Hiba regarded as a form of violation.

According to her mother, Fatmeh, Hiba left the family home as usual on 19 May after meticulously cleaning it and preparing lunch. She said she was going to classes, but instead ended up outside the Haamakin Mall in Afula, not far from Jenin, blowing herself up when challenged by two guards.

On the walls of Jenin she stares out from her poster like a vengeful nun. Her eyes are defiant, her pupils enlarged, and her eyebrows are plucked. Although she is conservatively dressed, wearing a veil to cover her hair, her face expresses impatience, as if she is bored with these pre-bomb rituals and wants to get on with the attack. A teenager with murder in her heart.

In the rubble of the former family home Fatmeh bitterly denounces those who recruited her daughter for death. 'I don't know what happened to her. If I had known I would have cut off her legs to stop her. Look at the suffering she has brought. No one is helping us now. No one from Islamic Jihad has come knocking on our door. They don't care.'

Unlike Izzadin Al-Masri's, Hiba's actions had delivered her family a shattering punishment; five months on Fatmeh Daraghmeh was still sheltering in the flattened remains of her house, sifting the rubble for the scraps of her possessions.

I ask if she had a picture of Hiba. And after scrambling around in the shed she uses as a home she produces a notebook-sized copy of Hiba's martyrdom poster, as if passing round a graduation picture. 'She was really beautiful,' she says, wistfully.

It is, she says, the only picture she now has of her daughter. Hiba, like Hanadi Jaradat after her, would have known the likely consequences, the ruin she would bring down on her already impoverished family. In choosing to die the two women also chose to destroy the lives of those closest to them.

Was it the lure of the other martyrs on the walls of Jenin, with their promise of the paradise ahead, in contrast to the despair of the present, that made the decision to die easier? Or the fame accorded to those depicted on these galleries of death? Or just the burning anger in their hearts, blinding them on all sides to the consequences?

As a spectator, even on the streets of Jenin, it is impossible to determine the answers. But one thing is clear. This terrible cult of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom, will not cease until there is a real peace in the Promised Land.